Resident-Led Research Policy and Power (RRPP): A Framework for Centering Community Voice in Participatory Research

For decades, health equity scholars and advocates have described that to build more equitable health policies, programs, and systems, researchers must first build authentic partnerships with communities that are marginalized and apply community members’ perspectives and expertise to collectively examine and develop solutions to health challenges. In response, participatory research methods that emphasize empowering communities to define research questions, implement studies, conduct analysis, and act on their findings are growing in popularity in the health research community. Despite its conceptual appeal, many researchers face challenges in its implementation, including funding infrastructures that do not adequately support participatory research and a lack of training and tools for researchers and community members seeking to develop productive, equitable partnerships.

For 3 years, mothers and grandmothers in East Harlem who belong to a community group called the East Harlem Action Collaborative for Child Health and Well-Being (EHAC) and staff at the New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM) have engaged in a community-based participatory research (CBPR) partnership. Together, our team has developed the Resident-led Research Policy and Power (RRPP) framework to help guide conversations between researchers and community members to elicit communities’ expertise to inform various stages of health research. RRPP is a five-part framework that reflects the groups’ conversational themes that were the most challenging, engaging, and foundational for our collective research and policy advocacy. The purpose of this commentary is to describe RRPP and to recommend its use as a tool to support the implementation of participatory research in a variety of contexts.

Journal of Urban Health.